


The Entire Universe

by speaks



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Pining Idiots, Space Shenanigans, a future collection of various completed one shots i havent posted to ao3, a pinch of existentialism as usual, and some weird ineffable emotions no one knows the name for, did I mention pining idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:08:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26409238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speaks/pseuds/speaks
Summary: A collection of one shots.First up: The Entire Universe (or, The Moon Valence)The team takes a trip to the outermost edge of the known universe, which makes a great stage for shenanigans. My piece I wrote for the Extrasolar Zine! :)
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 143





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 1st chap is placeholder for table of contents
> 
> This is me posting a bunch of shit that's already been written/completed for ages but isn't posted to ao3. I'll add to this collection when I can :) You will probably recognize some of them from when I made a collection like this a while back lol. The only reason I deleted that collection was I had attached it to a one shot (The Songs of Distant Earth) that I decided I wanted on its own after all. Being my first klance piece, it was just too special haha. Anyway I think I'll finally get around to reuploading things! Also get ready for more zine pieces I've never posted anywhere. ;)

**Table of Contents**

**1\. The Entire Universe** (aka, The Moon Valence)

_from the Extrasolar Zine_

The team takes a trip to the outermost edge of the known universe, which makes a great stage for shenanigans. My piece I wrote for the Extrasolar Zine! :)

_2_ _. on its way..........._

_from another zine_


	2. The Entire Universe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for the Extrasolar Zine.
> 
> The team takes a trip to the outermost edge of the known universe, which makes a great stage for shenanigans.

At the outermost edge of the known universe, an uninhabited moon orbits the dead planet of an even deader star. 

It's listed in the castle’s archaic starmap as SKxC-2497t—or, it was, until Pidge dubbed it Valence and promptly hacked into the starmap to permanently update its name in the file. _Valence. You know, like the electrons,_ she explained while Hunk snorted at her joke, and that was when Lance excused himself from the dull drilling procedure to go explore the desolate lunar surface.

Valence hangs poised at the end of the universe in such a literal sense that it evokes crippling existential dread if Lance lets himself think about it for more than two seconds at a time. They’ve been sent out here to gather ‘ancient matter,’ chemically unchanged since not long after the Big Bang itself, for a defense weapon the Olkari are building. For days now they’ve skirted closer and closer to the void beyond the outskirts of this star system. This desolate black moon is the farthest they’ve come—the farthest they, or anyone else, could possibly go. The last stop before Nothing.

As Lance wanders farther from the drillsite where the others are working, he sees Keith standing at the crest of a faroff hill, face raised to the sky. 

Lance glances back at the glittering expanse of the local galactic supercluster where the distant castle stands silhouetted like a drip of half-dried paint on the sky, almost out of sight over the sharp rim of a crater. Then he turns back to Keith, who is standing stock still as he gazes in the opposite direction, directly into the abyss that extends above and around Valence, the infinite void, an inky endless darkness empty of all things. God only knows what kind of emo stuff he’s thinking about.

“What do you think, boy?” Lance says to Red through the helmet link. The lion sits a few dozen meters away exactly where Lance left him. The ember glow from the star mixed with the charcoal lunar surface makes Red look like the last fleck of ruby ore left behind in a long forgotten mine. “You wanna go for a spin out there?”

Red’s reaction is instant. He drops into a crouch, low to the ground and tense, and Lance can swear he hears the lion growling in his mindscape. 

“Woah, easy,” he says, hands out to calm him. “What’s up? You don’t like it?”

The mental growl tapers to a whine and Lance looks back at the void, shivers crawling up his spine. Anything that makes a Lion of Voltron uncomfortable cannot be good. But it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before, right? Only empty space.

 _Empty space with absolutely nothing on the other side,_ his mind whispers back.

Shaking off the shiver, Lance travels across the barren plain to Keith. Valence’s low gravity carries him there in great weightless bounds, but even then it takes almost ten minutes to reach Keith’s side.

To Lance’s annoyance, Keith doesn’t react at all to his arrival. That _just_ won’t do.

“You afraid of the dark, Kogane?” he needles over the comm. He’s trying to provoke him but it ends up a little more thoughtful than planned. Because as he speaks his eyes catch on the twin set of footprints leading straight across the plain from the drillsite—his and Keith’s—and it occurs to him that his place is so remote and untouched that those footprints will probably stay here until the end of time. 

Keith side-eyes him. “No? Are you?” 

“Not even a little,” Lance lies.

“Huh.” Keith smirks doggishly. “That’s funny, ‘cause the way you keep glancing upward, it seems like you’re nervous.”

Lance mirrors the smirk. “Well I bet I’d go farther out there than you would.”

“I really doubt—”

Lance interrupts by activating his jet pack, which pushes easily against the gravity of the moon. What Keith doesn’t know is that Lance let Pidge use his jetpack as a test subject on the last moon while they were all bored and waiting, and she gave him a little extra propulsion power. Keith glares up at him, his frustration obvious even in the dim light and through his blue tinted visor. Lance’s responding laughter is all it takes to goad Keith into the bet. Swearing over the comm, Keith activates his own jetpack and launches straight past Lance.

“Hey!” Lance yells, and whips around to catch up with him. 

Keith is laughing too now, and that’s so distracting that Lance barely thinks about what they’re flying into. (What they’re flying dead away from.) He’s got tunnel vision for the voice in his ears and the thrill of the race. They’re neck and neck when Lance shoots Keith a smirk and says, “Sayonara, samurai!” and then activates ‘turbo mode.’

There’s a sharp intake of breath over the comm as Lance goes _rocketing_ ahead at double speed. 

For a moment, Lance is winning. 

But then it all goes wrong. Sound might not travel in space, but the explosion echoes up through his suit when one of his two jets gives out—a sudden sputtering death—while the other one keeps going strong. One second he’s in control, and the next second the entire universe is spinning before his eyes, over and over and over like an overclocked carousel determined to toss him to his death. There’s a voice shouting in his ear but Lance doesn’t understand it because his spiralling trajectory has carried him so far so fast that he can’t get Valence in his sights at all anymore. And that’s when the reality hits him; where he is and how terribly far he’s strayed from Valence, the only matter out here, which grows smaller and smaller with every jet-powered spin. He is nowhere. There’s _nothing_. Without his jetpack he can never get back there, to solid ground, to life; he’ll just keep spinning farther away until the universe looks like a starspeck and then even that will be gone. He tries to twist, to find Keith, but his trajectory is locked and he can’t see anything but the void. It’s all black. Everything. It’s gone. _Gone_. He’ll just float out here in the ether until he runs out of oxygen and—!

Weight. 

Something strong cinches around his waist. He’s hyperventilating, kinda, but he registers a voice over the sound of his own breathing. 

“Hey, I’ve got you, I’ve got you Lance, hang on—” There’s a fumbling motion at his back. “What did she do to this thing?” Keith mutters, and then activates his bayard and jams it into the remaining jet responsible for Lance’s wild tailspin. 

The resulting explosion causes them to smack helmets and go careening away from each other again, and Lance is not done panicking because he has no way to curb his momentum. He still can’t see Valence or anything else at all and he’s officially dead in the water now. An astronaut without propulsion is a _dead astronaut._

“Breathe,” Keith says, and Lance feels a bit of his panic ebb as Keith calmly activates his own jets and soars back over to him. But it’s only when he grabs ahold that Lance finally feels grounded enough to calm his breathing. “You okay?”

Lance can’t even work up the energy to be embarrassed about how hard he’s clutching Keith. “Y-yeah. It’s just...whew. Kinda hit me all at once where we are.”

“Yeah. Me too.” 

If Lance isn’t mistaken, Keith sounds just as shaken as Lance. The sound makes Lance’s heart flip over, and it flips over again when he looks away from the void back to Keith and sees the reflection of the now-distant Valence in Keith’s visor. 

“Woah,” he gasps, and they both turn together to look at the universe. 

They have a spectacular vantage point now, and they soak in the sight of it in awe for a solid few minutes. The remote, lifeless planet that the pockmarked Valence orbits, the crimson red giant star stained black with death, the elliptical galaxy which stretches away from Lance and Keith in every direction, above and below and side to side and away and away and _away_ —away in every direction except for behind them. Lance knows millions and millions of these shimmering stars they see are actually faroff galaxies all their own, but it’s hard to believe. Hard to fathom that what they are seeing right now is the entire universe, all at once. This is everything there is, or has been, or will be. It’s humbling. A foreign emotion unfurls in Lance’s chest, airy and spiritual and full of stars, and it occurs to him that this might be the only time in his life he’ll ever experience this particular emotion. That is, unless they stray beyond the end of the universe again someday. 

The longer they look, the stronger this feeling gets, and the emptiness at Lance’s back grows a little less haunting with every passing minute.

Still.

This long, mystical silence can’t last forever (not longer than their oxygen tanks anyway) and Lance knows he’s gonna have to be the one to break it. So he does. “I can’t believe we came so far out here,” he says. “Probably a stupid thing to do.”

“Yeah. We’re really stupid,” Keith laughs softly. “You—” He falters, and his voice is even softer when he starts again. “You make me do stupid things.”

Taken aback at Keith’s tone, Lance looks away from the stars and finds Keith gazing back at him fondly. The dim crimson light from the red giant catches on Keith’s spacesuit in fiery crescents and valleys, and for some reason Lance thinks of the Sonoran desert at sunrise back at the Garrison, eight billion light-years away.

Before Lance can decide how to answer, the fondness from Keith’s voice bleeds into his face, and then he’s leaning in, tilting his head, eyes fluttering shut, lips parting just a smidge, and…

...and his helmet visor raps into Lance’s.

Lance’s jaw drops as Keith’s eyes fly open in surprise, straight-up _surprise_ , almost like he forgot helmets were a thing in space. _Oh my god._ All Lance can do is blink at him in shock as Keith jerks his head backwards. “Did you just—”

“What? No,” Keith defends. “No, I— We should probably get back to Valence before we drift too far.”

“Keith.”

“I only have so much propulsion fuel and we—”

 _“Keith.”_ Lance can barely speak. He’s beside himself. Keith’s subsequent embarrassment erases any doubt Lance might have had about what just happened. It’s unmistakable. Keith just tried (and epically failed) to kiss him. 

_“What,”_ Keith pouts, giving up on the flimsy cover-up.

Lance brings his arms down to the middle of Keith’s back, reeling him in closer until their visors clack together again. Slowly and purposefully and with crystal clear intent, 

Lance brings one hand up to Keith’s helmet. This is a deadly idea but man Lance is full of those today.

“Kiss me?” he whispers.

Flabbergasted, Keith’s eyes flicker to Lance’s mouth. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not,” Lance hums, and brushes his thumb on the secret button just under the right jaw-seam on Keith’s helmet, which causes Keith to tense in Lance’s arms.

For a second, Keith simply stares at him in open-mouthed, abject shock. Then, in one decisive motion, he brings his thumb up under Lance’s jaw too, flashburning away all trepidation. “Take a deep breath.”

 _Oh wow, we’re actually doing this. Okay._ “Don’t forget to squeeze your eyes shut tight,” Lance warns, his adrenaline resurging again, blood pounding in his ears at the _completely insane_ stunt they’re about to pull. “Ready?”

“Go,” Keith breathes, and Lance sucks in a deep lungful of air, wrenches his eyes shut, and presses the release on Keith’s visor. 

Sound vanishes; his ears pop as the subglacial vacuum presses and pulls on him all at once. They have precious little time—a human can only last fifteen seconds in open space before passing out—so they surge in with urgency and miss, and their noses crash, and by the time they come together _just right_ Lance’s thoughts are microwave static. Keith is the only planet in the entire known universe, and Lance wants to burn up in his atmosphere. Wants to make a home there.

But he can’t. Not yet, anyway. Not here, because his lips are freezing solid and stick painfully to Keith’s as they break the kiss. Their visors hiss shut with a flurry of red, flashing alerts, but he ignores them, teeth chattering as he grins. “You m-make me d-do stupid things t-too,” he echoes, fogging up the inside of his visor.

There are ice crystals in Keith’s eyelashes and dusting his cheeks, and a harsh split bleeding on his lower lip. They both need a good hour or two in a healing pod for this, honestly. Keith shivers again and says, “Let’s g-get back to the universe.”

Still blinking the ice out of his own lashes, Lance ponders Keith’s phrasing.

Then he adjusts his grip on Keith and turns his sights back on Valence. “If the universe ends where m-matter and energy end,” he poses teasingly, “then can’t we never go outside it? Doesn’t that make us the end of the universe? 

An eyebrow quirks up at him. “Like, you and me?”

“Yeah,” Lance says with a lopsided grin. “You and me.” And he means it. 

It may be unclear still what their place is in these vast cosmos, or what they are to each other, or what lays in store for them in the days and years ahead back in that chaotic field of worlds. But he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he likes how the words _‘you and me’_ taste when he’s facing Keith Kogane. So if he has to pick someone to brave the end of the world with again someday?

Out of everyone in this entire universe, he will always choose Keith.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who participated in and purchased Extrasolar!!!
> 
> This was quickly copy pasted so please let me know if there are glaring errors lol.


End file.
